America is in a debt crisis that is both deep and wide. More than 43 million Americans hold some amount of student loan debt, with the amount this spring standing at more than $1.7 trillion. Credit card debt also tops $1 trillion. All told, Americans carry nearly $18 trillion in personal debt.
Our national government faces the same debt-laden reality. As a nation, we currently owe more than $34.5 trillion. This year alone, the deficit between government revenues and spending will reach $1.9 trillion. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office gave a grim forecast for the decade to come, projecting a $56 trillion national debt by 2034.
The point should be obvious: this path is unsustainable. We already dump massive amounts of money just into covering this debt. Americans now pay more than $570 billion in non-mortgage interest payments annually, nearly as much as they pay on mortgages. The federal government already pays nearly $900 billion just on interest payments for current debt. That’s more than Congress appropriated to spend on national defense in 2024.
Think about what Americans privately and the country corporately could do with that money were it not servicing debt. Many families with strained budgets would see much greater room for not only meeting daily needs but investing in future security. Consider the benefits to infrastructure, education, and research for government expenditures.
Yet that is so far from our reality it is hard even to consider with any seriousness. Regardless, our private and public debts will continue to inflict social and economic damage. If our trend does not change, those harms will only increase. Private debt will at some point go from crushing a family here and there to a more widespread fallout. Public debt will continue to undermine economic growth but at some point force us to make very hard choices. Those choices not only portend further economic crisis but also a social one pitting old against young, class against class, in ways Americans have never seen.
Part of the problem continues to be the blame game. Tuesday’s news resulted in political partisans pegging policies and politicians they don’t like as the culprit. Personal debt is the result of globalism or greedy corporations or other private sources, they claim. And the national debt came from aid for foreign wars or from tax cuts or from a host of other governmental actions, they insist.
All of these have some level of relevance to the problem. However, none of these actors seems serious about the debt. Instead, partisans only seem to invoke fiscal restraint when convenient for other priorities.
Beyond the blame game, our debt crisis reveals another deficit — one of virtue. We need greater temperance to control the pursuit of our desires. Of course we must give grace for the fact that rampant inflation and other economic problems have strained budgets, personal and public. But our glut of spending predates those, growing in good and bad economic times.
Moreover, we need to increase our commitment to justice. We are creating burdens for our children and grandchildren they did not choose but which they will have to reckon with on our account. That isn’t fair and it will cause serious pain.
Next, we must have prudence. Relieving the debt cannot be done in one law or one family budget meeting. It must be a course correction that wisely seeks to guide us toward responsibility over the long term.
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Finally, what we perhaps need most is the virtue of courage. Courage is the internal fortitude to exercise self-control, pursue justice, and implement prudence, despite external opposition. Any serious attempt to relieve our debt crisis will meet determined, sustained opposition. Reformers will be called evil, scare-mongers, and other names. Real courage will require doing the right thing and seeking to persuade Americans that this right thing also is the needed thing.
Will enough Americans muster up these virtues to meet our debt crisis? We have not seem them yet. However, we should not despair. Americans have shown an amazing ability to rise to challenges that would have destroyed other peoples. They have proven their wisdom, mettle, and goodness time and time again. Why not now, too?
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.